Love Mountains

Carole, we were together again, a few hours ago, maybe flying kites in a mountainous area after getting a quickie cholesterol check in a doctors office, against a broad rectangular wall, coming in from the outside emerging from a lovely tall wooded gate with scant flowers and butterflies painted on it, weathered made to look aged against a narrow staircase, the light grayish gate with a delicate character to it, maybe Asian, and I woke I up and cried and cried, still now in front my computer writing this.

Hanukkah 2009

Your boys were here tonight in this dimension as you were in another earlier this morning in a dream. You and I sitting across from each other in Nana Anna's living room, which wasn't her living room at all, a tea shop of sorts, but the the view, as I remembered it, overlooking the the woods. There was a Japanese two-some, two women our younger age at another table, each table a narrow short bench. Your brown silky hair fell below your shoulders and you nose squinched the way it did when exhaling smoke from a cigarette. It feathered your face and I didn't complain about the smoke as I would have then, wanting instead that moment to be whole and real and knowing otherwise, you my sister, a mirage?

Tethered. Wireless.

Oh, Carole .... these obsolete tears, grief unwashable. Seven years, however defined — revisions of home, dust and old thumbprints.

Airborne

I had the feeling I was in a cockpit, sitting at the rounded edge of my sister’s dinning room table, my feet on the floor. I could feel the phone receiver but could not see it, or my hand cupped around it. “We’ll meet on Lugo,” she’d said. My mother’s presence was evident, she mopping the floor, my mother never mopped a floor in her entire life!

“Not to worry about the kids,” I said to my sister, “they’re arses!” We’d laughed. “Mother, I’m to meet Carole at Lugo ….” Mother was grounded, in real time also died, buried, Carole airborne those vaporous letters at her funeral, and now me, clinging to a telephone cord.

Rendezvous

Today, together, not in this time, timeless. You and your beloved. I felt it, a flutter. Chagall-like. Bliss.

Lightposts

My sister, today on Craggie's birthday, I can only imagine your celebrations, all that he'd told me of your happiness. Then cut short, hopefully rejoined.

In my recent dream he was ordering a conch salad with cheese, happily standing in an outdoor cafe by the shore line. Maybe you both did once, a past in Key West, on his birthday, your beloved, energies entwined.

He died earlier this year, we were not told.

"You can't rival the dead for love. Lose every time..."
Toni Morrison, Jazz

August 15

To you, Craggie, with love for your birthday.

I've begun this post many times, started and stepped back, words in what language to reach you? Each time I try for something bold to write, a thought reflecting loss and bravery, I see instead your evidence on the mossy tree spirit you tacked onto the sea grape trunk, among the sprigs and sway of green welcoming like the great aunts whose echoes you penned on a box after my sister died when the preponderant heavens opened, and you knew then, and before then, those awaiting skies, opening.


Hope with Carole

Sun Setting

January 3, 1950 — January 3, 2009
Today is your birthday, you 59, me 60 ... if.